Shoppers wrestled one another to get their hands on discount goods in one Asda store in London. As the scenes spiraled out of control the police were called in. Several people were arrested across the country and stores were closed temporarily. One woman was injured after being hit on the head by a falling television at a Tesco store in Manchester.

Police were quick to condemn the shops lack of security ahead of the event describing the scenes as ‘akin to a mini-riot’.

“I think what’s really disappointing though is the fact that, when you’re planning an event, you ask yourself the question what can I reasonably predict is going to happen,” explained Greater Manchester Police, Detective Chief Constable Ian Hopkins. “You could predict they were going to get large crowds, and that they should’ve planned appropriately with appropriate levels of security to make sure that people were safe,” he added.

The day after Thanksgiving in the US, Black Friday is usually a big sales day. Supermarkets in the UK have adopted the sales device over the past two years in a bid to boost profits ahead of traditional Christmas sales.

Visa predicted that online card sales would top £518m on Friday, making it the country’s biggest shopping day on record.

The consumerist phenomenon has also been adopted in Europe and Asia. Though in France, there was no talk of a ‘vendredi noir’ prefering to stick with the American term Black Friday.